A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

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Canada under the Quebec Act 1774. from T. Pownall’s map of the Middle British Colonies of N. America, London 1775. to face page 81

B. V. Barbishire, Oxford, 1908

It will be remembered[49] that these territories had not been included in the province of Quebec for three reasons: that their incorporation with the conquered province might have been held to be an admission that the British title to them only dated from the conquest of Canada, that their annexation to any particular province would have given to that province a preponderating advantage in regard to trade with the Indians, and that the extension to them of the laws and administration of the province of Quebec would have necessitated the establishment of a number of military garrisons throughout the territories. The first of these three objections was, in fact, taken in the debates on the Quebec Bill. ‘The first object of the Bill,’ said Mr. Dunning in the House of Commons on the 26th of May, 1774, ‘is to make out that to be[50] Canada, which it was the struggle of this country to say, was not Canada.’ The second objection was clearly potent in the minds of the partisans of the old British colonies, who opposed the Bill. It would seem that when the Proclamation of 1763 was issued, the British Government had contemplated passing an Act of Parliament, constituting a separate administration for the Western territories, but the plan, whatever it was, never came to the birth;[51] and, as the King had foreseen, ‘great inconvenience’ had arisen ‘from so large a tract of land being left, without being subject to the civil jurisdiction of some governor’.[52] This inconvenience the Quebec Act tried to rectify by bringing these western lands under the government of Canada.

The line now laid down, on the motion of Burke in the House of Commons, was carried from the point where the 45th parallel of latitude intersected the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, up Lake Ontario and the Niagara river into Lake Erie, and along the southern or eastern shore of Lake Erie, until it met the alleged frontier of the state of Pennsylvania, or, if that frontier was found not to touch the lake, up to the point nearest to the north-western angle of Pennsylvania. From that angle it skirted the western boundary of Pennsylvania down to the Ohio, which river it followed to the Mississippi.

Claims of Pennsylvania.

In the debate in the House of Commons a petition was presented from the Penns, claiming that part of the province of Pennsylvania was situated to the north-west of the Ohio, and Lord North offered no opposition to the petition, on the ground that the Bill was not intended to affect existing rights. On a map of 1776, after the passing of the Act, Pennsylvania was shown as jutting out at an acute angle into Lake Erie, and the boundary line, identical with the western frontier of the state, started from the lake near Presque Isle, and struck the Ohio at Logs Town, west of Fort Duquesne and slightly east of Beaver Creek, leaving to Pennsylvania the whole course of the Alleghany, and Fort Duquesne or Pittsburg. It will be noted that, further east, the line, being drawn along the St. Lawrence and the lakes, excluded from Canada the whole country of the Six Nations, which had been demarcated as Indian Territory by the Agreement of 1768.[53] The net result was to leave the boundary line south of the St. Lawrence, where it had been drawn in 1763, as far as the intersection of the 45th parallel with the river, and thence to follow the waterways up to the point in the southern shore of Lake Erie where the old French route to the Ohio left the lake. From the Atlantic up to this point the present international line between Canada and the United States is not far different at the present day, though more favourable to the United States, especially where, since the Ashburton Treaty of 1842, the state of Maine runs northward into the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. But, by carrying the boundary from Lake Erie to the Ohio and down the Ohio to the Mississippi, all the Illinois country and all the western lands, for which English and French had contended, were confirmed to Canada.

Reasons for the extension of the province.

There were good reasons for taking this step. Eleven years had passed since the territories in question had been left as an Indian reserve. Events move quickly in a border land, and encroachments grow apace. The time had come for some defined system, some recognized law and government. As far as there were permanent settlers in these regions, they were, it would seem, although the contrary was averred in the House of Commons, French rather than English; and it would be more palatable for colonists of French origin to be incorporated with Canada than to be absorbed by the purely English colonies. The native population would unquestionably be better cared for under the government of Quebec than under the legislatures of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The waterways still, as in old times, made communication easier from Canada than from the southern colonies; and to those colonies, on the brink of war against the mother country, the mother country could hardly be expected to entrust the keeping of the West.